PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THE BOOK

• Jurisdiction: Colorado

A. PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THE BOOK

This twelfth edition of Colorado Land Planning and Development Law has been prepared in order to put summaries of the relevant law into the hands of public and private planners, planning commissioners, government officials, consultants, and lawyers who work in the area of land use planning, development, and redevelopment in Colorado. We hope that by bringing together the land use planning and development laws, which are currently widely dispersed throughout the Colorado Revised Statutes (C.R.S.), we can increase the number of practitioners with accurate knowledge of the law and help to improve the quality of land use planning and regulation in the state. In order to avoid bias in the materials presented, the contributing authors and editors include professionals from both the private sector and the public sector.

This new edition of the book contains summaries of various areas of law prepared by some of the best law firms in Colorado, along with citations to the more recent and important cases decided by the courts to interpret the statutes and resolve land use disputes. For ease of reading, we have not included names or citations of cases in the text of the legal summaries themselves. Instead, the names and citations to relevant cases are generally found in footnotes at the bottom of each page. In order to make the material more readable and usable to non-lawyers, the form of case citations has been modified in some instances to show where in the state the case occurred. Attorneys are cautioned that the case citations are not necessarily in Bluebook form. Readers are cautioned that chapter manuscripts for this book were submitted during the second half of 2020, and the materials are current through December 31, 2019 or later.

The book focuses on Colorado land use law and does not purport to cover federal law or the land use laws of Colorado's local governments. There are some exceptions, however. In the areas of exactions, regulatory takings, historic preservation, urban renewal, and environmental law, Colorado law is so intertwined with decisions made by the federal courts and by other jurisdictions that leading cases from outside Colorado have been included. In other cases, decisions from the federal district court, the Tenth Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court are cited because they are directly based on Colorado land use disputes. Although the book does not attempt to cover local laws, the text occasionally uses...